The blossoming of three-argument verbal constructions in child language: a study of “give constructions”

Aliyah Morgenstern (1) , Chang Nancy (1)

1 PRISMES - PRISMES - Langues, Textes, Arts et Cultures du Monde Anglophone - EA 4398

Over the course of development, children make their way through successive transitory stages that exhibit internal coherence. This phenomenon can be observed at all levels of linguistic analysis, but the gradual assembling of verbal constructions (Goldberg 2006, Tomasello 2003) is of special interest for linguistic theory. Children appear to match characteristics of the input quite closely, and the arguments they produce for a given verb do not differ markedly from those they hear (Morgenstern & Parisse, 2012). However, they do not always produce all of the arguments typically found in the adult patterns. In particular, children have difficulties producing forms with multiple arguments, especially three-argument constructions, and often undergo a progression from incomplete to complete patterns (Bloom 1990, Valian 1991). Previous studies suggest children's ability to learn verbal constructions is highly sensitive to the input (Choi 1999). Verbs must appear frequently in a wide range of semantically accessible contexts and with a wide range of possible arguments for children to learn to use them (Slobin 1985). Theakston et al. (2001) have demonstrated that the sentential frames mothers use with a particular verb is a clear predictor of those used by their children. This study examines the development of constructions based on the verb give, often cited in the literature as prototypical of verbs appearing in the ditransitive construction (Goldberg 2006). We analyze spontaneous language data from three English-speaking children aged 1;06 to 3;06, taken from the Providence Corpus (CHILDES), focusing on how children learn to express multiple arguments. After presenting some theoretical background and a survey of the literature, we introduce the data and methodological approach. Results of our analyses are then discussed and compared with previous studies.

Au début du processus d’acquisition des constructions verbales, les enfants ne produisent pas tous les arguments des verbes qu’ils utilisent, en particulier quand il s’agit de verbes à trois arguments. Selon certains auteurs, l’enfant est particulièrement sensible au langage adulte qui l’entoure et produit les constructions en fonction de la fréquence des structures entendues (Choi 1999 ; Slobin 1985 ; Theakston et al. 2001). Afin de tester cette hypothèse, nous avons analysé les productions des constructions en give (donner) de trois enfants américains (Naima, Will et Lily) dans des suivis longitudinaux de la base de données CHILDES. Notre analyse montre que les enfants ont besoin d’avoir atteint une certaine maturation cognitive et linguistique avant de produire des constructions à trois arguments et une exposition à un nombre d’occurrences suffisant pour traiter le langage entendu. Il y a de grandes différences individuelles dans les rythmes et les parcours d’acquisition des trois enfants, mais tout en étant sensibles aux productions adultes, les enfants deviennent capables de pratiquer leur propre analyse du langage entendu en assemblant de manière créative les constructions qui sont à leur disposition.

Mots clés: Language acquisition; give constructions; French language acquisition; acquisition of argument structure

Domaines: Linguistique

Aliyah Morgenstern, Chang Nancy. The blossoming of three-argument verbal constructions in child language: a study of “give constructions”. Geneviève Girard-Gillet. Autour du verbe anglais. Construction – lexique – évidentialité, Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, pp.107-120, 2014, 978-2-87854-629-3. ⟨halshs-01350597⟩